Security and stability concerns incident to rapid propagation of viruses, worms, and other intentional and/or unintentionally nefarious code has led to attempts to providing software updates to networked machines. Unfortunately, the desire to provide updates can be stymied by devices leaving the network over which updates are received. Thus, while a patch or update may be applied to many machines on a network, such as by using the Microsoft® System Management Services (SMS), machines that have gone dormant, and if infected when removed from the network, pose a risk of re-infecting the network upon reattachment to the network.
In an effort to avoid risk of infection or re-infection of a network, some network environments implement on-connect policies that are applied to a connecting machine in order to validate its state before it is allowed on to a network, e.g., a policy may be to verify current software on the machine before it may generally communicate with the network. Unfortunately, there is a “chicken and the egg” type problem in that a machine may be denied access from the very network from which it needs to receive an approved update to make the machine suitable to be connected with the network!